Embodiments of this invention relate generally to a heat dissipation system and method for an integrated circuit assembly, and more particularly to a system and method of dissipating heat from an integrated circuit die.
Integrated circuit devices, microprocessors and other related computer components are becoming more and more powerful with increasing capabilities, resulting in increasing amounts of heat generated from these components. Packaged units and integrated circuit die sizes of these components are decreasing or remaining the same, which increases the amount of heat energy given off by the components for a given unit of surface area. Furthermore, as computer related equipment becomes more powerful, more and more components are being placed inside the equipment which is also decreasing in size, resulting in additional heat generation in a smaller volume of space. Increased temperatures can potentially damage the components of the equipment, or reduce the lifetime of the individual components and the equipment. Therefore, large amounts of heat produced by many such integrated circuits must be dissipated, and therefore must be accounted for in designing the integrated circuit mounting and packaging devices.
In current packaging techniques, heat sinks are typically applied to the side (back side) of the integrated circuit opposite the side (front side) from which the electrical pin connections are mounted. As such, the heat sink is oriented extending away from a printed circuit board to which the integrated circuit is mounted. Therefore, generally all of the heat has to be extracted from the back side of the integrated circuit die. There is generally a limitation on the amount of heat that can be extracted from the back side of the integrated circuit die, because of the thermal resistance induced by the thermal interface materials (such as a silicon die, a heat pipe to transport heat from the die to the heat sink, and any thermal grease or adhesives) used between the back side of the integrated circuit die and the heat sink. Generally, to increase heat extraction through the back side of the die requires increasing the volume of the heat sink (this generally means increasing the stack height of the heat sink to dissipate more heat). The overall size of the heat sink is generally limited by the volume constraints of the housing. For example, some mobile products such as lap-top computers and ultra-mobile computers require very small stack heights.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for an enhanced heat dissipation system that does not require increasing the stack height of the heat sink for dissipating the heat generated by the integrated circuit die.